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Mammalian Near-IR Vision Through Injectable, Self-Powered Retinal Nanoantennae
- DoubleCribble 8y agoOne step closer to "having the technology". Colonel Steve Austin would be proud.[0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Six_Million_Dollar_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Six_Million_Dollar_Man
- goldenkey 8y agoThis was way before my time. Now I know where "We have the technology. We can rebuild him" comes from. Uncanny! Thanks for referencing, added to my entertainment TODO list :-)
- DoubleCribble 8y agoIMHO, one of the best TV intro's ever. "Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better...stronger...faster."
- goldenkey 8y agoIs that where Daft Punk got the lyrics too?
- andrewflnr 8y agoI wouldn't ordinarily be an early-adopter type when it comes to medical technology in my eyes of all places, but damn, IR vision. When this is ready for humans I'm going to have to think about it.
- system2 8y agoIt would take very long years for this to become available to the public. I am sure we will hear many early-adopters' stories in the news which will make you rethink what you are thinking right now...
- Tehchops 8y agoWonder what the potential long-term psychological/physiological impact is... Your brain would essentially be forced to constantly process more visual data than it was used to... more data than human brains in general had evolved to process. Surely that has consequences.
- leggomylibro 8y agoWell, not necessarily - this treatment works by converting the near-IR light into green light which the eyes process normally. If this did work in people, I would let a few waves of early adopters go first. It's a big open question as to how confusing things might be if you were IR/green colorblind.
- bigiain 8y agoPart of me feels like "Gimme gimme gimme! I want it _now!!!" Another part of me is more thinking "I wonder what unexpected side effects we'll see when we have data from clinically controlled trials of large numbers of people using this technology over timespans of 40-50 years?"
- leggomylibro 8y agoLet me put it this way. I was an early adopter of a simple sort of body modification - I had a small neodymium disc magnet sheathed in some inert material implanted in a finger. It was cool and all, but I eventually got it removed because it was sensitive and if the inert sheath ever broke, it'd be bad news. Bodies don't like rare earth metals. When I got it removed, the person who did it turned out to know the one who put it in (small world), and they told me that the new ones were tiny slivers which were almost impossible to feel, much less remove. And that wasn't exactly comforting. Mine practically popped out, but a tiny sliver? Nowadays, I think two or three times about those sorts of 'life hacks'.
- roywiggins 8y agoYou can see into the ultraviolet today with a cataract procedure. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1455745 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1455745
- b_tterc_p 8y agoI think we could also use this to make people more colorblind.
- gilbetron 8y agoMeh, I'm colorblind and I would do it for the option to see the world differently! First, though, I'd want some idea of how much the world would change.
- Frenum 8y agoI'm curious if a similar procedure could be used to correct for colorblindness by making one eye into the "red eye" and the other into the "green eye". Filtering and enhancing color frequencies as appropriate.
- whatshisface 8y agoYou could do that with old fashioned tinted 3D movie glasses.
- b_tterc_p 8y agoFirst instinct was to say no. Because you would only be able displace a color you can’t see to overlap with a color you can see, meaning you’re just shifting the color blindness around. But the two eye solution is interesting. I bet you could also do palette swaps for everything
- rolleiflex 8y agoI’ve read the study just now - it does appear that: a) The chemical put into the retina is surprisingly biocompatible, in that it does not appear to have caused anything out of the ordinary to happen. It works by effectively converting IR light to visible light - so it does not involve ‘sending more data’ to the brain, or ‘opening another colour band’ or anything like that. It is seen as just plain old green light, because the crystal structure of the chemical basically converts 980nm~ IR to 500~nm visible green light. So no uber-neurohacking going on here. b) The procedure they are using to put the chemical in place is fairly run-of-the-mill medical procedure for humans for treatment of eye diseases, albeit a little icky. So, I’m surprised, to say the least, but this could actually work with humans as a fairly harmless enhancement. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop, but haven’t seen one in the study itself for the time being. (Disclosure: not an expert, but I follow related fields)
- jakeogh 8y agoLook at a bright enough 980 and you will see blue, I assume as it up-converts to 490. Not sure if it was the beam exapnder or my eyes...
- gresrun 8y agoLook at a bright enough 980 and you won't see anything else!
- jakeogh 8y agoVery true. I find myself gently explaining laser safety way too often for comfort, even in lab environments. We don't have an intuitive understanding of the dangers. I my case, I knew the divergence and had calculated my expected wattage before taking a peek back downrange... but ya.
- ficklepickle 8y agoI knew someone that briefly turned on a laser engraver with their arm in it. Not sure of the wavelength, but she claimed to feel it go through and could smell burned flesh. It was fairly new tech at the time and the doctor couldn't tell her much. She had some mild tingling afterwards, but nothing major. She didn't tell her boss because she had disabled the safety switch, for some reason that seemed good at the time.
- steve19 8y agoIf this was in a sci-fi action movie I would roll my eyes at the implausiblilty of it. If it actually works... Wow!
- daemonk 8y agoSo its kinda like putting small IR->visible light lenses into your cornea.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tener 8y agoI wonder if some military unit would be interested.
- jakeogh 8y agoFor night operations you could use 980 flashlights without the NIR headgear.
- germinalphrase 8y agoI’ve read that IR boosting contact lenses are already a thing, but that’s more gossip than knowledge.
- tomerico 8y agoIs 980nm in the range of body heat radiation? In other words, would you be able to have "night vision" in full darkness by seeing the heat from animals?
- orbital-decay 8y agoNo. Thermal vision is LWIR, far down the spectrum.
- phonypc 8y agoI wonder if/how it would interfere with normal vision. Could you mistake IR for normal green and vice versa, or would IR have some other characteristic that would distinguish it? Are there situations where you'd run into lights that are intrusively (or even blindingly) bright in IR but not visible wavelengths?
- jakeogh 8y agoYes and yes. Standard NIR illuminators are everywhere. You would need context to distinguish that it's not green except I suspect it's a very specific green so your brain may be able to do interesting things with that knowledge. Edit: looking at the emission charts, it's a wider bandwidth than I expected, not sure how well the brain would be able to use the specificity of the green. Things that are normally just cool enough to not emit significant visible would suddenly be visible. It's far far from the standard 7-14um thermal IR, but would be... well.. downright awesome. It might be possible to design a mixture of these to generate "impossible colors".
- whatshisface 8y ago>It might be possible to design a mixture of these to generate "impossible colors". Since they just convert light between frequencies, they won't show you any colors you couldn't see by illuminating your retina with the output frequencies the old fashioned way.
- jakeogh 8y agoAgreed, I'm referring to type 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_colors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_colors
- scotty79 8y agoIf the treatment changes just green receptors then IR green would activate just those, but real green would activate all three receptors to various degrees. So maybe you could tell real green from IR green.
- hateful 8y agoWhat we filter out and don't see is just as important as what we do. If we could see all wavelengths, we'd have just noise.
- dflock 8y agoWell, if you just switched that ability on, then yes. But if you grew up seeing more/all wavelengths, then presumably your brain might learn to use that information in a useful way?
- chrisweekly 8y agoI agree w/ your first sentence. But if we could "see all wavelengths", for any reasonable definition of "see", that would imply our eyes and brains had evolved to distinguish visual signal from noise.
- 14 8y agoGrowing up watching Star Trek The Next Generation this is so cool to read about. Talk about Geordi Laforge vision. That part that I find so cool is seeing a lot of things that were mere dreams on Star Trek become real. Our smartphones are essentially tri-corders and now we could potentially get night vision.
- derekp7 8y agoToo bad the tricorder app got pulled from the Android store by Paramount due to trademark violations. Anyone know of a good version of a tricorder-like app that doesn't use the Star Trek LCARS theme?
- lightedman 8y agoSensorLab.
- acct1771 8y agoThere's an LCARS live wall on F-Droid App "Store" (F-Droid.org)
- floki999 8y agoExcitingly interesting
- gok 8y agoNow this is the kind of journal article title I expected in 2019.
- johnhenry 8y ago"Negligible side effects" stood out to me because I remember reading in a few places [0] [1] that depriving oneself of Vitamin A can improve vision; but at a health risk. I've also heard that this is impossible. [2]. I wonder if these things are co-related somehow? [0] -- https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajplegacy.1938.123.3.732?journalCode=ajplegacy https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajplegacy.1938.12... [1] -- https://petapixel.com/2014/08/23/dietary-experiment-successfully-extends-human-vision-near-infrared/ https://petapixel.com/2014/08/23/dietary-experiment-successf... [2] -- https://petapixel.com/2014/08/25/retinal-neuroscientists-rebuttal-humans-cant-see-infrared-matter-eat/ https://petapixel.com/2014/08/25/retinal-neuroscientists-reb...
- jbay808 8y agoIt's probably a good time to invest in the 980 nm-blocking sunglass industry.
- theon144 8y agoWow, that sounds like quite the biohack! As most of the biology stuff went over my head, I couldn't find if it is reversible though, they just mention it was "stable" at 10 weeks after injection, but is it expected to be working indefinitely? Can you wash it out somehow, if you later decide against it?
- poisonborz 8y agoFor now I can only see downsides of this on healthy eyes. You would be constantly blinded and disturbed by various equipment, and your different vision compared to others would be the source of constant confusion and annoyance. What would be the use case for healthy patients in an urban environment?
- scotty79 8y agoI wonder how well eye lens focuses NIR. And if it focuses NIR differently than visible light you'd have to choose between blurry IR green or blurry everything else.
- notthingnill 8y agoI wonder if some variation of this experiment would be useful for retina detachment, personal interest (my retina was completely detached and I was left with 0.60 vision in the left eye). What's the effect of giving more information to the cells, would the brain use the extra information to self improve vision? In my case the right eye would be used for training the left one. Another experiment I am thinking of, If a 3 month old child suffer a retina detachment, would his brain be able to recover the full vision by the brain making appropriate changes?
- coldacid 8y agoWhere do I sign up?